He resented it, perhaps a little, that his young daughter had so easily
accustomed herself to the thought that she had no father. "She might
just want to see me occasionally. But I'd only frighten her, I suppose,
if she did."

Munty Ross had very little of the sentimentalist about him; he was
completely cynical about the value of the human heart, and believed in
the worth and goodness of no one at all. He had, for a brief wild
moment, been in love with his wife, but she had taken care to kill that,
"the earlier the better." "My dear," she would say to a chosen friend,
"what Munty's like when he's romantic!" She never, after the first month
of their married life together, caught a glimpse of that side of him.

Now, however, he did permit his mind to linger over that vision of his
little daughter tumbling on the stairs. He wondered what had made her do
it. He was astonished at the difference that it made to him.

To Nancy also it had made a great difference. She wished that she had
stayed there on the stairs a little longer to hold a more important
conversation. She had thought of her father as "all horrid"--now his
very contrast to her little world pleased and interested her. It may
also be that, although she was young, she had even now a picture in her
mind of her father's loneliness. She may have seen into her mother's
attitude with an acuteness much older than her actual years.

She thought now continually about her father. She made little plans to
meet him, but these meetings were not, as a rule, successful, because so
often he was down in the city. She would wait at the end of her
afternoon walk on the stairs.